


this town could never hold me for long

by Fireflies12



Series: the hill i'll die on is about 90 meters of bricks (colored indigo and inscribed with my name) [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Ghosts, Music, clara is secretly c418, give clara her own tag you cowards, well not secretly people just call her c418
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27977106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fireflies12/pseuds/Fireflies12
Summary: Clara was born in Summer, and her parents instantly knew the small town they lived in couldn’t hold her for long.Or:Author gives a Female Astronaut named Clara over 2K words of backstory because there's not enough Clara content on here
Relationships: Clara & TommyInnit, Kinda - Relationship, shes a ghost - Relationship
Series: the hill i'll die on is about 90 meters of bricks (colored indigo and inscribed with my name) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2058759
Comments: 15
Kudos: 120





	this town could never hold me for long

Clara was born in Summer, and her parents instantly knew the small town they lived in couldn’t hold her for long.

She remembered running, screeching her lungs out with joy, and chasing after her little brother when she was eight and he was four.

She remembered warm autumn days, crickets chirping in the bushes, as her mother brushed out her hair and braided it up. 

She remembered reading out large, blocky letters in school, remembered feeling them on her tongue and wondering how she felt to them.

She remembered her father’s rough but gentle hands, guiding hers as he taught her about the stars on cloudless nights. She always asked him what they were, and he’d chuckle and tell her, every time-

Stars are the souls of those who burned bright and furious and beautifully. Those souls never truly rested, and even in death, they would burn and twinkle and glimmer in the coolness of space.

He’d look at her, pride in her eyes, and tell her that if she looked very closely, she could see fainter stars- the small ones that were always present, filling up the night sky and yet not being noticeable.

Those, he explained, were calmer souls, the ones who were not furious or bright but beautiful nonetheless. They would live in the sky forever, and the only ones who ever noticed them were those already missing them in an empty sky.

There were so many stars, bright and faint, a tapestry of history that would never fade, only getting clearer as time went on.

She remembered looking at the sky and being struck by a sudden question- were the stars lonely? Did they ever want anyone to talk to, in the big, empty expanse of dark that they lived in?

She asked her father, and he shrugged and said that maybe they were.

She remembered looking at the sky and promising to keep it company.

She remembered being accepted into the only University that trained Astronauts for hundreds of miles around. The paper of the acceptance letter had crinkled in her hand and she had wondered what she sounded like to it. The wax seal had been smooth and unbroken, and she wondered what it thought of her.

She remembered shouting with glee, chasing after her brother in an imitation of their childhood and promising to visit them.

University was tough work- she didn’t have to wonder what her classmates thought of her, with her loud voice and tendency to move her hands around as she talked. 

But she still wondered what her desk thought of her putting her books on it, what the walls thought of when kids from nearby towns wrote on them, what the tree she always sat under thought of her singing to it.

She wondered what the stars thought of her trying so hard to keep them company.

In Spring, her mother was caught by a hunter’s stray arrow while outside, and she visited her father and brother for the funeral. Her brother had clutched her hand in his, knuckles turning white, and made her promise to make sure their mother wasn’t lonely. She promised.

That Summer, her brother drowned in the river while fishing, and she couldn’t visit but she scanned the night sky over and over again and whispered stories to the stars before she went to sleep each night.

In the Winter before her graduation, her father fell ill, and she visited him one last time. He told her about the stars again, voice quiet, and told her to keep them company. She wouldn’t be able to find his star, he said, but even one less lonely soul makes the world a better place.

She graduated eventually, and it didn’t feel hollow, like she expected it to. It felt like a new beginning.

In Autumn, she was finally accepted for the next launch. It would just be her and one other, a brief trip to the stars.

The stars were so much brighter than she could have expected. There were millions, billions of them, each one flickering and shining in its own pace.

She whispered stories through the glass window, promising to remember each and every one of them.

Maybe that was why they shone- there was no other reason, truly. Maybe they wanted to reach out to lonely souls everywhere and remind them that they weren’t alone, that no matter what the stars would always be there. Maybe they called for brothers and sisters and children and parents and hoped there was one less lonely soul in the world after they called.

Fifteen days in, something happened.

She wasn’t sure what, but the stars that called for her sounded just a little bit more like her fellow Astronaut, and when she went to sleep and woke up, it had been far too long.

The shuttle was gone, leaving her behind and yet not making her feel lonely.

The Earth had changed, too.

The remains of everything she could remember were gone, replaced by simple homes and small towns and clear skies. There were no universities or spaceships or summer nights.

She wandered, for a long, long time. The crickets didn’t chirp, and fathers didn’t tell their children of the stars.

She had always been stubborn, doing more work than she had to.

If nobody would tell children of crickets and stars and warm summer nights, then she would.

She just had to figure out how.

The first one was an accident- she had just been messing around with discs, and hadn’t realized it was recording the sounds she was making until it already had almost three minutes on it. It was just the echoes of the cave she was living in, combined with the sounds of her tools and mobs fighting nearby.

But listening to it reminded her of Summer, whispering stories to the stars, and the sound of water in the background made her chest ache and remember chasing her brother.

She had made it on the 13th of the new year, according to the old system, and so she inscribed it with basic information, using the originization system she’d learned when she was young.

_ 13 _

_ Charles, 4 Years Younger Than Me, 18 At Death _

The center of the disk she painted in gold, remembering the color of her brother’s hair before it changed to brown, and she slipped it into her chest carefully, along with some pieces of paper, leather, and string to cushion it.

She made the next one on the same day. The sounds were strange sounding when recorded, but she had instruments made the same way her music teacher used to talk about, and it reminded her of the stray cats that used to wander her town, eyes bright and fur slicked down.

She thought of how there were no cats anymore, only feral ocelots, and named it after them. She painted the center green, thinking of the warm spring grass they used to roll it.

The rest of them happened slowly, each one containing a little piece of wonder.

She made Blocks after the first time she saw a little village with it’s neat wooden houses and a language she didn’t understand but wanted to, the first time she fought off zombies to protect the villagers who couldn’t thank her but understood nonetheless.

When she first saw Spring again after nearly a hundred years, when she felt the warm rain on her face and the dew in between her toes, she nearly cried, and instead she sat out in the open and made 11.

She visited a strange place with high cliffs and earthy tunnels, and the wind whistling through them combined with her wonder and awe to make Far, a little shard of glory that she could carry with her.

The first time she saw a desert, wide and flat with cacti on it, her breath caught in her throat and her eyes teared up and she wrote Mall as the sun scoured everything it could get its hand on, the hot wind lashing at her to no avail.

She accidentally made a portal, when she was making an obsidian door frame and accidentally started a flame in it, and when she first saw the Nether in all it’s red, scorching glory, she felt Mellohi swelling in her ribs and creeping around her lungs.

Stal grasped its way into creation when she saw a river and really  _ looked _ at it, at the cool water and life-giving banks, drowning creatures and nurturing them with no discrimination, but her flute broke partway through recording. She decided to keep it like that.

The first time she found a hive of bees, their wings fluttering and rustling, the air sweet and sticky with the smell of honey and pollen, she wrote Strad, the creaking of trees swaying and the sound of animals walking only serving as background noise.

Ward was an ode to the Nether, a message to the ghasts and pigmen, a lullaby to the soft netherrack and yielding soul sand, a quiet melody for the burning lava and humming glowstone.

But Chirp-

Chirp was so much more.

It wasn’t the last disc she made- far from it- but it was so much more difficult than the others.

Chirp was warm autumn days and chirping crickets, clear winter skies and stories about the stars, shrieks of joy and stories of the past. It was a culmination of everything she had ever known to that point- the cold loneliness of space, the warmth of spring rain, the scorching winds of the desert, the quiet humming of the nether.

Chirp was birth and life and death, and everything before and after and in between.

Chirp was everything she ever knew and everything she had ever learned and everything she was learning still.

After Chirp, for a long, long while, she rested.

She was tired, but she still made duplicates of the discs, putting them wherever there was a convenient empty chest- temples, villages, sometimes even buried treasures and shipwrecks.

But she didn’t write any new songs.

Instead, she waited.

The discs went undiscovered for a long while, hundreds of years wearing down parts of the inscriptions.

Evidently, someone found 13 after a long while, all letters of the title worn off except for ‘C418’, and so they decided that was who wrote it, along with all the other discs that had no known creator but similar sounds.

It wasn’t a bad name. She didn’t hate it.

Nobody truly understood the discs, for a long, long while, instead just listening to them and wondering what she was thinking when she wrote them.

Some of them, though.

Some of them understood.

There was one- a child, really, younger than her brother had been- who listened to every one of them, and understood them.

She watched over him- he was bright and burning and furious, and he was so similar to her she doubted he’d last long, but she could try and make him last a little longer.

It was a long, long while before he found Chirp, but when he did, she knew he understood.

She couldn’t speak with him, but she could sit nearby and hum softly while she thought of her new disc, and try and stop him from falling quiet so steeply.

He was followed by a lonely soul, one who kept promises in his pockets and handed them out like they were candy. The lonely soul couldn’t see her, but sometimes he’d stare where she was and look confused.

After Chirp came Pigstep. It was a sharp change, but she looked at the one who understood and his past, looked at the violence and destruction, and knew that she could mold something peaceful from the violence.

She made only a few copies of it, and put most of them in the nether- it was for the nether, after all, for the gold and magma and skeletons- but one of them she half-buried in the sand by the one who understood.

The lonely soul found it, of course, and brought it to the one who understood.

Clara was born in Summer, and her parents instantly knew the small town they lived in couldn’t hold her for long.

They were right.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Shrine to Solitude](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28318986) by [7thSpaceCadet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/7thSpaceCadet/pseuds/7thSpaceCadet)




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